IntroductionofDECPDP-10

September 1967Introduction of DEC PDP-10

The PDP-10 was a mainframe computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from the late 1960s on; the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor model 10". It was the machine that made time-sharing common; it looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the 1970s by many university computing facilities and research labs, the most notable of which were MIT's AI Lab and Project MAC, Stanford's SAIL, Computer Center Corporation (CCC), and Carnegie Mellon University.

The PDP-10 architecture was an almost identical version of the earlier PDP-6 architecture, sharing the same 36-bit word length and slightly extending the instruction set (but with improved hardware implementation). Some aspects of the instruction set are unique, most notably the "byte" instructions, which operated on bit fields of any size from 1 to 36 bits inclusive according to the more general definition of a byte as a contiguous sequence of a fixed number of bits.

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